Zoe walked around the hill to the other side and looked for somewhere to start digging her tunnel. She half hoped that she’d stumble into a crack that connected to the large frozen cavern and not have to deal with any tedious digging herself, but didn’t expect it.

She looked through some of the larger cracks, and found most of them to be pretty small splits in the rock and dirt. Maybe if she spent some time pushing into it, they’d open up into something else but she had no idea how to tell where was best to start with that.

There were a few that led into larger openings, similar to where she had been setting up her own home. One such crack was quite narrow and stretched much deeper into the hill than any of the others, and Zoe decided to start her digging there.

She left and cut down some of the trees surrounding the crack entrance so she’d have an easier time of finding it later. One of the logs, Zoe spent some time chopping up into pieces to build a bit of a platform to place the logs on. The rest she cut into more manageable lengths and dragged onto the platform to keep them off the cold wet ground infested with bugs.

Later on, she’d come back and maybe do something with the wood. Firewood, or maybe she could try making charcoal at some point. That was something she always thought was interesting, but never had the opportunity to try. She was pretty sure that all you had to do was burn the wood in a low oxygen environment, so she could make something for that. Maybe she could burn it in one of the caves? Would that work?

Next, she hiked back up the hill to get an idea of where the cavern was. She peered into the frigid hole and bared the cold gusts of wind that brushed past her to look around. Then she made her way back down to the cave she was going to start in, trying to remember at least mostly where the goal was.

It wouldn’t be perfect, she’d love to have something to help measure things so she could be sure she was digging the right way. But the cavern was massive and stretched far below the hill. As long as she tunneled in the right direction somewhat, she’d at least connect to one of the many tunnels that branched off from it.

Zoe stood at the wall of the narrow cave and stared at it for a bit. She wanted a tunnel that she could run through, but not so large that she’d be at much risk of a cave in. The last thing that she wanted was to be running away from whatever she found only to have the roof fall in and block her between a rock and a whatever she was running away from.

It was one thing when she was widening the tunnel she turned into her chimney. There was already space there, she just had to clear out a little bit more of it. And on top of that she was crawling, the amount of material she actually had to remove then was miniscule. But here it was going to be immense.

She could dump the rocks and dirt just on the ground next to her log pile, but it was going to be a tedious process of digging and dumping, over and over. Zoe sighed and then started pouring mana into the rock wall in front of her.

It didn’t take an awful lot of mana to manipulate stone, and she was able to sustain the draw with just her natural mana regeneration at this point, which she was thankful for. But it did still take quite a lot to flood the stone and wrench control over it, especially when it was such a large area she needed to manipulate.

An hour later, she pulled a thick slice of stone off the wall and stored it away in her bracelet. It was large enough for her to stand in, with a foot of clearance above her head and just wide enough for her to swing her arms out as she ran without scraping them along the sides.

She’d need it to be a little longer before she could tell how viable it was to run through, but it seemed good enough at least. Zoe spent the next day continuing to dig her tunnel. She found that it needed to be a little bit wider so she had a bit of extra leeway while she ran, and went back over what she’d already dug out to extend it a bit.

The pile of rocks outside kept growing as she dumped the large slabs of stone onto each other. They cracked and crumbled under their weight, but that was okay. Zoe could always attach them back together if she needed to with her Earth Manipulation, and she wasn’t even sure what she’d want to do with so much rock in the first place anyway.

Maybe she could use it to build her forge, or a simple anvil to start with, or a campfire. But stone was so easy to come by anyway, it just didn’t make much sense to drag it all the way back over to the other side of the hill. Maybe she could build a bit of a house on this side to stay at, but that would take a long time with her Earth Manipulation where it was, and she had a perfectly fine cave she could stay in anyway.

But whatever it would be used for, the pile kept growing as Zoe dumped slab of stone after slab of stone onto it. She was only able to dig a few feet into the rock before her bracelets were filled with how large the tunnel she was digging ended up being, and imagined by the end she’d be able to just go make her own small hill for ants out of everything she excavated.

Another day passed as Zoe continued digging into the rock before she found something she expected, but wasn’t excited for. The wall at the end of her tunnel took on a red tinge and left dark red streaks on her claws when she scratched it.

She’d run into more hematite. It was bound to happen while she was digging, she knew. The ore was plentiful, a large chunk of the mountain was bound to be iron of some sort. Hematite, maybe some magnetite. If she was lucky, she’d find some shiny hematite at some point, though she didn’t have a magnet to be able to tell the difference anyway.

There were two options she faced, as far as she could see. The first was she could try to tunnel around the hematite deposit, and the second was to dig straight through it. There was no real way to know which was better. Perhaps this was a thin tendril of it that stretched through the hill, and if she moved to the side a few feet then she’d be able to run parallel to it for a while.

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But perhaps it stretched perpendicular to her tunnel, and she could dig through it in just a couple days then be free the rest of the way. Or maybe it was just a large chunk of hematite and she’d be stuck digging through it the rest of the way to the cavern no matter what she did.

Zoe decided to just dig straight through. Having a straight tunnel was going to be nice, and she could use the iron later on down the line. It would mean taking a much longer trip to walk back around to her home cave to drop off the iron whenever she was full though. But it would also be a lot more time spent actually digging so the actual ratio of dropping off the material wouldn’t change that much, at least.

She rubbed her shoulders, and started flooding the mineral with her mana. Digging through iron with her Earth Manipulation skill wasn’t her favourite thing to do, but at least in this instance it was the right choice. Her pickaxe was violent and imprecise. What she needed now was the gentle, exacting touch of her skill even if it did take longer.

What had been taking hours began taking days as she sat at the wall and flooded it with her mana. At first, it wasn’t too bad. Much of the rock was still just the dark grey stone. Granite, maybe? Gabbro? She wasn’t sure, her Mining instructor hadn’t taught her much about the different minerals so she had to draw mostly on what she remembered from early science classes.

After a few weeks of digging away at her tunnel, she decided to take a break for a bit. She had managed to get it almost seventy feet long, but still had no clue how close she was. The temperature was getting somewhat colder near the end, and Zoe even began to find it a little difficult to breath so deep in so she’d flood it with her Wind Manipulation skill every so often.

But whether that was because she was getting closer to the cavern or because she was just deeper into the hill, Zoe had no idea. The pile of rocks had stopped growing so quick as the majority of earth she dug through had turned to the red hematite. Instead a new pile of rocks had begun growing outside her home cave on the other side of the hill.

Moving all of the material over took a few hours for each trip, but it would be worth it eventually, she knew. When Zoe wanted to start refining the hematite, having a large pile of it ready to go nearby instead of hours away would be appreciated.

Zoe sat down on her bed and summoned some dinner for herself. Venison meat wrapped in a spicy leaf she foraged and a small slice of the pale pink fruit. She had found in her testing that the fruit didn’t explode when it was cut, only when it was crushed. So a sharp knife would slice off small chunks, but then when she bit into those small chunks they would explode into the sweet, melting, gelatinous slime.

It paired very nicely with the salty and somewhat spicy venison wrap and she had a couple of roasted wild carrots to go with it on the side. A nice meal, and Zoe continued to be happy with her decision to buy more seasonings than raw rood. It motivated her to try new things and experiment more, and she was enjoying the variety quite a lot. That the food wasn’t bland and dry anymore helped a lot, too.

There were a huge number of skills that Zoe hadn’t even tried enchanting something with yet. Years ago she had found the ones she liked most and just ended up sticking to those ones without deviating much. But that didn’t mean the other ones weren’t going to also be useful, she just got stuck in her ways.

There were too many for her to go through every single one right now, but that problem was only going to keep getting worse as she kept unlocking new skills so she told herself she’d get through them all before she explored the cavern, just in case some would be helpful.

For now, she wanted to focus on finding something that would help seal in the cold once she did break into the large icy cavern. There were a few options she saw that might help that out, and she set out to experiment with them first.

Wind Manipulation was her first test, it had a good chance of helping out with both the tunnel sealing and also her chimney. Zoe summoned a ball of ice with her Frost skill and enchanted it. As soon as she did, Zoe felt a breeze pulled towards the ball like a vacuum sucking up all of the air for a few seconds before the enchantment wore off.

Zoe kept repeating the process a few times to see what kind of control she had over it, and found that she could make it blow or suck air from any direction that she wanted. If she could get enough mana input to sustain the enchantment, it would work out great for her chimney.

She had an idea that she wanted to test for her tunnel too, so she focused on her internal mirror and set it up with Wind Manipulation, Meditation and Enchanting, which wasn’t a skill she had anymore according to her stat sheet but was still very much so present in her soul. For the Wind Manipulation, she focused on making it pull air through in one direction.

Then Zoe created two small door fist sized door frames of ice and flashed the enchantment onto them. The mana drained much slower thanks to Meditation and Enchanting, but it was still too much to sustain them indefinitely so Zoe kept pouring more mana in to keep them stable.

Next, she created a small tunnel of ice around the two doorframes so they pulled air from the middle and pushed it out both sides. After a few moments, the flow of air came to a near stop, just a faint trickle that she could feel with her Wind Manipulation skill.

Zoe smiled. It wasn’t perfect, but she had created a near vacuum in the tunnel, probably. She hoped. If she could scale that up to the full tunnel, then she’d be able to have an insulating layer of very low pressure air where heat would struggle to travel between. Add in a couple of simple wooden doors to help block the air flow, and the cold cave would struggle to leak any more than it already was.

The next skill she wanted to test was Earth Manipulation. Zoe thought it made more sense to test it on Earth rather than her ice, and grabbed a chunk of rock from outside her cave to enchant. She flooded it with mana and then forced the mana to her image of Earth Manipulation from her soul.

At first, nothing happened. But when she pushed mana into it, the rock squished and stretched. When she stopped pushing mana into it the rock returned to its original shape and burned through the remnants of mana left in it. With a bit of effort, Zoe found she had a decent bit of control over what shape the rock warped into when she enchanted it.

Zoe reached out to the rock near her cave entrance and pulled it across to seal off her cave. Then she pushed an enchantment of Earth Manipulation, Meditation and Enchanting onto it while picturing the rock squishing out of the way to open a path into her cave. Zoe fed mana into the rock, and it behaved just as she wanted. The rock squished up against the wall and let her in, then slowly sealed back up when she stopped dumping mana into it.

She laughed to herself. That was a lot simpler than trying to make a massive vacuumed hole in the hill, but she still liked her Wind Manipulation solution anyway.